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Can Shoot ‘Em Ups Influence Army Recruitment?

February 22, 2018

The US Army has long used games as a way to teach tactics to troops and recruits, starting with tabletop war games. In the 1980s the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) approached video game designers to create games for training purposes. In the following decade, a modified version of Doom II was used to train marines. The 2004 Xbox game Full Spectrum Warrior was developed by the military-funded USC Institute for Creative Technologies as both a commercial product and a training tool. By putting a training game into the wider world, the army must have been aware of the game’s potential for recruitment and for winning hearts and minds.

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Work depicted here was sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL). Statements and opinions expressed and content included do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.